


face to face with someone new

by vdova



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, BuckyNat Secret Santa, F/M, POV Natasha Romanov, oops there's no resolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 04:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13333629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vdova/pseuds/vdova
Summary: Natasha owes a certain solider an apology. She's not sure he'll accept it.





	face to face with someone new

**Author's Note:**

  * For [supernutellastuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernutellastuff/gifts).



> This ended up in a hybrid verse. There’s references to the red room, but it’s the comic timeline- Nat was born in the 20s, met Bucky in the 50s, etc etc. 
> 
> I love getting an angst prompt. This was so much fun to write!

When Natasha turned to walk away from Tony, she was hit with a very real and very scary thought: there was nothing holding her to the states any longer. Before, there had been SHIELD. Then, the Avengers. But with her very not subtle “fuck you” to Stark (and my proxy, the team and accords), she was a free agent. A floating thought. In fact, America was likely the worst place for her to be. One picture posted to one person’s social media account, and she’d have the iron assholes on her doorstep. 

But there wasn’t anywhere for her to really go. Finding a country without extradition treaties would be easy enough, but the matter was greater than her second home country tracking her down. Her first act was to get underground, something easier than breathing for the ex-spy. Her next order was to find someone she could actually trust. 

Three weeks, twenty four plane rides, four dozen phone calls, ten train trips, four boat rides, and a very long trek on the back of a camel, and Natasha met a not-so-great looking Steve on the border of Wakanda. For the most part his wounds had healed, but Natasha wasn’t about to ask what had happened.

In fact, it took 20 minutes into their trip to the capital for either of them to speak. Natasha cleared her throat and murmured, “Ironic,” so quietly Steve wasn’t sure she’d even spoken.

“What is?” he asked after a full minute, glancing at Natasha before looking back at the road they were driving along.

“It’s ironic, being here with you, hiding from the Avengers. We were leading them a month ago.” It wasn’t a new thought from her; it had been pervasive in her time on the run. Once, she’d been a leader. Now, she was a fugitive from people she’d once considered her family.

Steve fell silent again after that, and Natasha dropped her gaze to stare at her hands instead of out the window. If anyone had a reason to be upset with her, it was him. She should’ve stood with him. After years of working together, she should’ve trusted his judgement. But the idea of everyone splintering and ending up on the run again scared her more than the alternative, and she sided with a man she’d never really seen eye to eye with. Hilarious, that her fear of going on the run had become a reality all the same. Any chance of things going smoothly were thrown out the window after the explosion. The one glitch in the machine Natasha hadn’t planned for was James.

She hadn’t known his name when they met half a century before. He’d called her Natalia, and she’d called him soldier. Later, alone, they’d moan those names when they were pressed impossibly close together.

And she’d pointed her widow bites at his head.

Natasha raked a hand over her face, stopping to rub at her jaw. Even if T’challa had been there (christ, that was a conversation she wasn’t looking forward to), there had to have been a better way to handle it. She’d had time to figure out what to do with Steve and Bucky, and it had ended in  _ that _ . Too many people needed apologies. She hadn’t felt so alone in years. 

The first small mercy came with the guard that met them- T’challa was in a meeting, and would meet Natasha later that afternoon. The second was when Steve gave some paper thin excuse as they walked to where Natasha would be staying, saying he was busy, or had a meeting, or some other lie that had a very low percent of being real. The third was that her bed was basically covered in pillows, which she dropped into the moment Steve left her side. The soft, comforting feeling only lasted about 15 seconds, however, before her inability to sit still caught up to her. 

Steve had given her the parameters for where the team was allowed, and she intended to survey the entire area out of paranoia. She was half caught up in a thought about what to say to Clint once she saw him again that the shadow in the hallway ahead of her went unnoticed. It wasn’t until she ran head first into a very solid and familiar body that she realized she wasn’t alone.

For a few beats, Natasha and Bucky just stared at each other. The pair of running shoes she’d thrown on that morning gave them a small height difference, and she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. They both opened their mouths to say something, snapped them shut in tandem, and opened them again. Finally, Bucky held a hand up and said, “When did you get here?”

It was kinder than Natasha had expected. He could’ve walked away and she wouldn’t have been offended. Her professional demeanor took over then, and she answered with a short, “Just now.” There was more to the story than that, but what did he care?

The silence fell between them again, and Natasha swallowed her fear to reach up and touch the stump where Bucky’s metal arm had been, “I saw Steve’s face. He’s healed, but those bruises had to have been damn deep. What happened?”

“Tony.” His answer was dripping with hatred, spite, and… regret? There was more of a story  _ there _ , but again, the topic dropped. It took another minute of dead silence before Bucky went straight for the jugular, “Why did you side with him?”

Natasha visibly flinched at the comment, staring down at the ground, and missing the look of absolute pain on Bucky’s face. It would be easy for her to give a half answer of ‘I don’t know’, but she’d made a promise to herself to leave the lies in the states. The question also told her something she had wondered: whether or not Steve had told Bucky about the conversation in the church. “I wanted the team to stick together,” she responded, still looking at the ground, “And if we ran, if we ignored the accords, we would have to split up.”

“And what about me?”   


The sheer amount of pain in Bucky’s voice got Natasha to look up at him, just in time to catch his eyes watering in a threat of tears spilling over. “I wasn’t  _ part _ of your team. They would’ve never stopped coming for me- if Steve hadn’t found me first, I would have been killed. Could you have lived with that on your perfect conscious?”

The insult caused Natasha to bristle, her hands clenching into fists at her side. “You know full well that isn’t true. My conscious isn’t clear, there was no one way out of the nightmare situation the accords put us in. Don’t play high and mighty with me- everyone involved was  _ wrong _ .”

That was what got Bucky to react, reaching out to grip Natasha’s forearm with his one remaining hand, “But one side was more than right. One side had  _ me _ . Did all this time apart really freeze your heart  _ that _ much?”

The quiet fell over them again, leaving Natasha with a burning expression and Bucky with one of confusion mixed with longing. They were standing right in front of each other, and all they could do was fight. Natasha wanted to go back to bed and wake up again, wanted a do over. Bucky just wanted her to tell him she still loved him.

But the silence wasn’t broken with words. It was broken with Natasha grabbing Bucky’s face to drag him down to her level, and smashing her lips against his in a mockery of a kiss. It was more teeth than lips, more frustration and anger than love. She still loved him, of course she still loved him. But in that moment, ‘love’ was the furthest thing from either of their minds.

Bucky’s hand shifted from her arm to her hip, cold fingers brushing under her shirt for a moment. It wasn’t enough to wake Natasha up from the stupor the kiss put her in. It took footsteps down a side hall for the pair to break away from each other, each fixing the other with a mild look of horror at what they’d just done. Couldn’t talk about their feelings, of course, but they could apparently fuck it out. Natasha made a mental note to stop spending time with Tony- an idea that was a tad too easy in the current climate.

“I need,” Bucky’s voice came in a pinched sound, causing him to clear his throat and try again, “I need time. To figure out what happened. What you mean to me now.”

It was a loaded statement that Natasha could feel in her bones. On one hand, of course he needed to figure it out. They weren’t the same people they’d been when they last parted, but it didn’t stop Natasha from feeling like there was something else going on. He’d seen a side of her she’d never wanted to resurface; he’d seen her fighting her own friends.

“I know,” was her only response. The fact that he had kissed her back for even a second was a surprise in their current state. For a moment, she thought about touching him again, but instead pulled her arms back to herself and folded across her chest. “I’m going to find Clint. I haven’t seen him yet.”

A beat, then Bucky pointed towards the archer’s room. She saw the hesitation in his face, as if he wanted to kiss her or hold her or do  _ something _ that would be counter intuitive to what he had just said. But she couldn’t bear to look at him any longer, so she brushed by him with a hurried goodbye and went looking for her friend.

Maybe this was the life she deserved for her past. Black Widows didn’t deserve happiness; maybe it was finally time she learned that.


End file.
